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![]() The more fragments we perceive and parse, the more lifelike the mosaic we make of them. ![]() This reality is revealed to us only in fragments. So with science: Bit by bit, discoveries reconfigure our understanding of reality. Yet we remain, to ourselves, “who” “we” “are.” Our physical and social environments change. Throughout life, our habits, beliefs, and ideas evolve beyond recognition. Was it then, Plutarch asks, the same ship? There is no static, solid self. As time began to corrode the vessel, its components were replaced one by one - new planks, new oars, new sails - until no original part remained. For a thousand years, his ship was maintained in the harbor of Athens as a living trophy and was sailed to Crete annually to reenact the victorious voyage. In the ancient Greek allegory, Theseus - the founder-king of Athens - sailed triumphantly back to the great city after slaying the mythic Minotaur on Crete. Kepler’s life is a testament to how science does for reality what Plutarch’s thought experiment known as “the Ship of Theseus” does for the self. Three centuries later, the marine biologist and writer Rachel Carson would reimagine a version of this view woven of science and stripped of mysticism as she makes ecology a household word. All of this he would accomplish while drawing horoscopes, espousing the spontaneous creation of new animal species rising from bogs and oozing from tree bark, and believing the Earth itself to be an ensouled body that has digestion, that suffers illness, that inhales and exhales like a living organism. He would be the first astronomer to develop a scientific method of predicting eclipses and the first to link mathematical astronomy to material reality - the first astrophysicist - by demonstrating that physical forces move the heavenly bodies in calculable ellipses. Kepler would disprove both beliefs, coin the word orbit, and quarry the marble out of which classical physics would be sculpted. All around him, people believe that the sun revolves around the Earth every twenty-four hours, set into perfect circular motion by an omnipotent creator the few who dare support the tendentious idea that the Earth rotates around its axis while revolving around the sun believe that it moves along a perfectly circular orbit. ![]() He inhabits a world in which God is mightier than nature, the Devil realer and more omnipresent than gravity. His name is Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571–November 15, 1630) - perhaps the unluckiest man in the world, perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. The story, intended to counter superstition with science through symbol and metaphor inviting critical thinking, has instead effected the deadly indictment of his elderly, illiterate mother. He has written the world’s first work of science fiction - a clever allegory advancing the controversial Copernican model of the universe, describing the effects of gravity decades before Newton formalized it into a law, envisioning speech synthesis centuries before computers, and presaging space travel three hundred years before the Moon landing. He is now racing through the icy alabaster expanse of the countryside in the precarious hope of averting another: Four days after Christmas and two days after his forty-fourth birthday, a letter from his sister has informed him that their widowed mother is on trial for witchcraft - a fact for which he holds himself responsible. Since his youth, he has been inscribing into family books and friendship albums his personal motto, borrowed from a verse by the ancient poet Perseus: “O the cares of man, how much of everything is futile.” He has weathered personal tragedies that would level most. A spindly middle-aged mathematician with a soaring mind, a sunken heart, and bad skin is being thrown about the back of a carriage in the bone-hollowing cold of a German January.
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